Staff Software Engineer - I

We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them. It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together. One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform. ABOUT TEAM The Business Technology team builds the internal applications that act as Confluent’s central nervous system for revenue, forecasting, and operational efficiency. We deliver strategic internal web applications that power deal lifecycle workflows, quoting, pricing and tiering, and planning tools used by Sales, Finance, and Customer teams. Our products enable data driven decision making before resources are committed, helping stakeholders plan proactively, optimize usage, and manage spend with confidence. The team focuses on high business impact internal–facing applications with mission critical outcomes for growth, efficiency, and scale. ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking an exceptional Staff Software Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with the ability to shape architecture, influence cross functional partners, and drive open ended initiatives across teams. You will own the end to end design and delivery of complex systems, identify high leverage problems, and set patterns that other engineers follow. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving real business problems with pragmatic, maintainable solutions more than building at massive consumer scale, and who can operate comfortably from hands-on implementation through technical strategy and stakeholder leadership. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of high impact internal web applications that support deal lifecycle, pricing and quoting, forecasting, and planning workflows. - Own complex, cross team technical initiatives from problem framing through design, implementation, rollout, and long term evolution. - Identify and drive high leverage technical investments that improve reliability, performance, developer velocity, and user experience across multiple applications and services. - Design and evolve microservices, APIs, and data models that integrate with systems such as Salesforce, billing, data platforms, and analytics, ensuring robust contracts and clear boundaries. - Partner closely with Product Managers and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical strategies, roadmaps, and deliverables over multi quarter horizons. - Provide technical leadership and mentoring for senior and mid level engineers, raising the bar on design quality, code quality, observability, and operational excellence across the team. - Champion engineering best practices including testing, performance engineering, incident readiness, and secure coding, and ensure they are consistently applied in your area of ownership. - Collaborate with peer teams to define cohesive end to end solutions and shared platforms rather than point integrations. - Contribute to and help refine the technical strategy, architecture principles, and career standards for the Commit Estimator and broader Application & AI Engineering domains. - Contribute to modernize the existing application and platform for scalability, availability, speed of delivering software and enabling AI capabilities for End Users . WHAT MAKES YOU SUCCESSFUL - 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial time as a technical architect on complex, business critical systems. - Deep hands-on expertise in full stack development using languages such as Go, Java, or similar, building services and APIs and modern JavaScript front ends (e.g., React). - Strong experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and comfort working with event streaming or messaging technologies such as Kafka. - Proven track record of architecting and delivering internal or B2B applications that support complex business workflows with high reliability and usability. - Demonstrated ability to decompose ambiguous, cross team problems into clear technical designs and milestones, and to ship high quality solutions on time for multi quarter initiatives. - Experience improving developer productivity and operational excellence through better abstractions, tooling, automation, and thoughtful refactoring of legacy systems. - Strong system design, data structures, and algorithms foundation, with an emphasis on pragmatic trade offs and simplicity in real world systems. - Comfortable operating in a cloud native environment (AWS or similar), using containers, CI/CD, and modern observability tooling to run and operate services in production. - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a track record of influencing stakeholders at multiple levels and mentoring other engineers. - Growth mindset, ownership mentality, and a bias for action in pursuit of measurable impact on revenue, efficiency, and customer experience. READY TO BUILD WHAT'S NEXT? LET’S GET IN MOTION. COME AS YOU ARE Belonging isn’t a perk here. It’s the baseline. We work across time zones and backgrounds, knowing the best ideas come from different perspectives. And we make space for everyone to lead, grow, and challenge what’s possible. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on job-related criteria, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by law.